Sovereign Syre Is A Boss Bitch

By Gram Ponante Of Gamelink's Naked Truth

Sovereign Syre reminds us that we have to refresh the page now and then, and that what was true in 2005 may not be — and need not be — true now. An alt model since 2009 and adult performer since 2011, Syre uses her nom de porn (her father was Native American, hence sovereign) in all her projects, clothed or otherwise.

"All the ways porn was supposed to ruin my life," she says, "it hasn't. So there's that."

In 2011 Syre had sent a naughty video of herself to her then-partner, the photographer JM Darling. "It was just too big for email, so I uploaded it to a tube site," she says. "And then it went viral and got on Fleshbot [my former employer when it was owned by Gawker]. Someone told me about this and I said, 'Hey, that's me.'"

Syre has a degree in literature and knows how the internet works, but she was still surprised how fast the video caught on. It served to force an issue that she had been thinking about.

"We were thinking: 'Art or porn?'" she says. "I found myself wanting to take it to the next level. 'Are we doing this or not?'"

[The relationship negotiations between an erotic model and the photographer who happens to be her boyfriend are both typical and as diverse as colors in the goddamn rainbow but aren't covered here. How the couple went from a photographic celebration of her individual sexuality to navigating the porn world is a different story and different conversation. Syre reminds us that porn sex is "work" and shouldn't be confused with intimacy.]

Porn won out, but Syre has always been an arty porn star. I seems front-loaded, like some performers are known for their tattoos or red hair or huge breasts — Syre's porn performances are thoughtful. In her first Sweetheart Video movies with Nica Noelle, Syre was strictly a girl/girl performer. She later worked with Kink.com and, still appearing exclusively with women, then began a collaboration with Dana Vespoli.

"Dana Vespoli is a total artist," Syre says. "I was relatively unadventurous and she made me feel like everything was OK. She;s always happy to create a space for me to be me."

"I already had a skillset that I came to the table with," Syre says. "Part of that skillset was simply the ability to say 'No, I don't want to do that."

This makes Syre's work with Vespoli over several movies, most notably the great "She's Come Undone" and "Hollywood Babylon," examples of porn's new economy. Both movies were passion projects shot at the expense of the production and then distributed by Evil Angel, essentially an eclectic pornography collective administered by John Stagliano. They are also an acknowledgment that artistic freedom is more possible now that most performers aren't making a hell of a lot of money in this business anymore.

"I'd easily do 20 normal girl/girl porn scenes for the opportunity to do three awesome ones," says Syre. "She's Come Undone," which was essentially a 2-woman scene played out in a cheap (we can hear real-life dogs and traffic outside) motel room between businesswoman-with-a-secret Vespoli and escort-with-a-past Syre, was fresh, grim, and sexy.

And then came "Hollywood Babylon," a "Sunset Boulevard" with more penetration.

Vespoli and Syre shot the movie over several months, getting scenes where they could, when they could afford them, working around the schedules of Deen, Stephen St. Croix, and Ramon Nomar, and "Marriage 2.0" star Ryan Driller, each a sought-after worker in porn's small male talent pool.

"We knew that making my first boy/girl scene would have some juice," Syre says. "The first of anything really seems to matter in porn. And rather than Brazzers style, I wanted this first to be a part of something I really loved."

A refreshing porn presence on Twitter, Syre's conversations are as lively and erudite as 140 characters allow. Like the Twitter interaction between James Deen and Bret Easton Ellis leading to Deen's casting in the Lindsay Lohan movie "The Canyons" (though it sank like a stone in theatres, Deen was a New York Times-lauded class act in that picture), Syre's online cleverness led to an offer from Wisecrack ("Thug Notes") TV to develop something for its channel.

"Wisecrack had received a grant from Youtube to develop more educational entertainment," she says. "Someone referred me — 'Oh, that's a porn star; you should have her do a show.'"

I ask if there is any anti-porn backlash about she and her "Boss Bitches of History" co-host, Ela Darling.

"I think it should be made clearer that we're porn performers, actually," says Syre. "Some of the Youtube comments are confusing. We being porn stars might help clear it up for people so they get the joke."

Syre and Darling have co-written four episodes of a program that spotlights emboldened female historical figures, including Cleopatra, Queen Isabella of Spain, and slave-turned-Montreal-arsonist Marie-Josèphe dite Angélique.